Conventional prior art magnetic write heads use ferrite material as the magnetic yokes or pole pieces. With the advent of thin film technology, it has been found to be advantageous to deposit planar conductors, preferably on the surface of one of the ferrite yokes that will serve as a substrate. The planar construction avoids crossover of conductor lines and the requirements for additional insulation. An additional problem found with magnetic heads of this type is the Joule heating (I.sup.2 R) in the gap formed between the ferrite yokes adjacent to the conductors. This heating leads to distortion problems of the magnetic head and the magnetic medium, which may be an oxide recording tape. One solution was to increase the number of conductive turns and to increase the cross-sectional area of the turns or windings to decrease resistance. However, the increase in cross-section of the windings is limited for an optimum configuration, because winding thickness is limited by gap length. Also, the winding should be close to the transducing gap for the most effective use of ampere turns in generating the write flux.
It has been proposed to provide a ferrite type head in which the ferrite substrate is grooved and a bias conductor is placed in the groove. The groove is then filled with a glass and lapped back to form a planar surface on which a write element conductor is deposited. However, such a structure requires the use of biased write operation, which is more complicated and expensive than the use of pulsed write current.